The emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) as the pervasive and ultimate open framework for multi-computer and multi-party collaboration has spurred rapid evolution of online business transaction processing and delivery architectures. The promise of heterogeneous networked systems inter-operating to conduct secure multi-party commerce over the Internet ith object-based transcation processing technologies is just being realized. The Web model's span of application across computer and communication networks from corporate private backbones (intranets) to global public backbones (Internets), and serveral grades of sub-networks n between (virtual itnranets or extranets), has created the universal "plumbing" scenario for the next decade. Distributed Ojbect Computing (DOC) standards that will both utilize and incrementally enhance this plumbing are fueling competition between "entwork" and "entwork-edge" technology companies in the creation of the next generaiton of Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce) overlay infrastructures. The dominant criteria driving choices can perhaps be best categorized into two powerful dimensions, namely, psychological and economicla, where decisions to locate essential Object Services for E-Commerce will need to address a mix of security, reliability and economies-of-scale attributes. This paper propositions a road-map to rapid collaborative approaches where network providers (NPs) and content providers (CPs) can offer best-in-class E-Commerce transaction services by addressing these attributes simultaneously.
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